«Jane Eyre», Charlotte BrontëHe asks whether she’ll forgive him. She answers you

Thirty times “reader”

Jane tells her own life, from a childhood at her aunt’s to her marriage, and along the way she turns to you thirty times: “reader”. Six more times she speaks of you in the third person, “the reader knows”, “let the reader add”. It isn’t decoration. She argues with you, corrects you, asks you to wait and promises to let you share her secret.

For the first eight chapters, childhood at Gateshead and the start of school at Lowood, she never addresses you once. The first “reader” comes only in chapter IX, as Jane explains why she spent her days of freedom with someone other than her best friend, Helen Burns: “True, reader; and I knew and felt this”. After that it picks up: thirteen times at Thornfield with Mr. Rochester, eleven at Moor House, four in the last two chapters.

What matters more is what she says. She tells you what she never says out loud to anyone: not to Rochester, not to the people she lives with later.

“No, sir” and “No, reader”

Chapter XIV, an evening at Thornfield. Rochester notices his governess studying him and asks her straight out: “do you think me handsome?” Jane says she ought to have answered with something conventionally vague and polite, but the answer slipped from her tongue before she was aware: “No, sir.”

In the next chapter she explains herself to you: “And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes? No, reader”. His face, she says, had become the thing she best liked to see. He gets one “no”, you get another, and both are honest.

Ten chapters on he is her fiancé, admiring her “radiant hazel eyes”. Jane doesn’t correct him. She corrects you, in brackets: “I had green eyes, reader.”

Forgiven, but not out loud

Chapter XXVII, the longest in the book. That morning the wedding fell apart in the church: Rochester has a wife, she is alive, and she is locked up on the third storey of Thornfield. The same day he asks Jane: “Will you ever forgive me?”

He isn’t the one who gets the answer. “Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot”, Jane writes, and adds at once that she forgave him all, “yet not in words, not outwardly; only at my heart’s core.” Rochester stands there wondering at her silence. And at first light she slips out of Thornfield.

Jane Elliott

Jane gives the coachman all of her twenty shillings, and he sets her down at a crossroads on the moors. For days she asks for work, until, half dead, she is let in at the door of Moor House. They ask her name, and she answers, “My name is Jane Elliott.” She had resolved beforehand, she says, to take an alias, so as not to be found.

The sisters’ brother, the clergyman St. John Rivers, will later ask her to come to India with him as his “helpmeet and fellow-labourer”. Jane argues with him out loud, and again keeps the real thing for you: “Perhaps you think I had forgotten Mr. Rochester, reader… Not for a moment.” Every night, she says, she went to her room to brood over him. At Moor House she turns to you eleven times, though this part of the book is half as long as Thornfield’s.

“Reader, I married him”

The last chapter opens with the most famous sentence in the book, and it is said to you: “Reader, I married him.” A quiet wedding: the two of them, the parson and the clerk. Back from church, Jane goes into the kitchen and tells the housekeeper, “Mary, I have been married to Mr. Rochester this morning.” Mary’s ladle hangs in the air for some three minutes, and all she says is, “Have you, Miss? Well, for sure!”

In the whole novel only two sentences begin with the words “Reader, I”: “Reader, I forgave him” in chapter XXVII and “Reader, I married him” in the last. The first is what Jane didn’t tell Rochester, the second is how it all ended. Both of them she tells you.

Verdict

Read it. Not for the secret of the third storey, which everyone knows anyway, but for the voice: Jane trusts the reader more than anyone in the book, and by the end you know her better than Rochester does.

At school they ask what the novel is about. A young woman who keeps her composure with everyone and tells the truth to you. One point off for St. John: he spends so long calling her to India that I nearly signed up as a missionary myself.